ABSTRACT
With the aim of increasing the durability of pavements, the use of glass fiber grid to reinforce asphalt pavements has received a lot of attention in recent years. Performance of the bond between asphalt layers including a glass fiber grid at the interface is among the important parameters to be investigated. In this work, the Wedge Splitting Test (WST) developed by Tschegg (1986) is chosen to evaluate the bond between such material layers. The aim of this study is to characterize the fracture mechanical behavior of the interface through the specific fracture energy GF. Experiments are performed on specimens extracted from full scale pavement sections. These specimens of significant size (200 × 200 × 150 mm3) are prepared with a cylindrical groove instead of a habitual rectangular groove. As recommended in the literature, a slim wedge of 14° is used to ensure the characterization of the bond in a quasi-pure crack opening mode I. A notch of 5 mm thick is sawn at the interface between the two material layers to guarantee the initiation of the crack at the interface. Tests are controlled with a constant displacement speed rate of 2 mm/min and constant temperatures (~20°C). A Digital Image Correlation (DIC) technique is used to evaluate and compare the interface crack propagation in two different configurations with and without grid at the interface.
